I drove to a FedEx office, made certified copies of every document inside, and had them couriered to Pat Holloway’s office for secure keeping.
And then I drove to a neighborhood I had noticed on one of my drives across the city. A quiet street. Older trees. Houses with proper yards and front porches. The kind of neighborhood that reminded me of the Tucson street where Harold and I had raised Daniel.
I had already been speaking to a real estate agent, not one who knew Renee. I had been careful about that. A woman named Judy, who worked an area well outside Renee’s professional territory.
One house in particular had stayed in my mind since the first time Judy had sent me the listing.
4 bedrooms. A sunroom facing east. A yard big enough for a garden. Quiet street. Good bones. The kind of house that felt like it was waiting.
When I got home that evening, Daniel and Renee were sitting in the living room together. They stopped talking when I walked in. Renee looked at me with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“Margaret,” she said. She rarely called me by my name. It was usually Daniel’s mom, or nothing at all. “We were just thinking it might be nice to have a family dinner someday. All 4 of us really catch up.”
I looked at her. I looked at Daniel. I thought about the folder moved a half inch to the left.
“That sounds lovely,” I said.
And I went upstairs to call Judy about the house.
The offer went in on a Wednesday morning. Full asking price, cash, through the trust. Clean and fast, the way Pat had advised.
Judy called me from the car as I was walking back from the neighborhood pharmacy.
“Margaret, they accepted. We’re in escrow.”
Her voice had the particular warmth of a professional who genuinely liked her client.
“30-day close. Congratulations.”
I stood on the sidewalk in the February sunshine and let the words settle over me.
Mine.
I had not felt that word apply to a place since Tucson.
The closing was set for the second week of March.
I said nothing at home. I continued to be the quiet woman at the end of the hall. I cooked Tuesday dinners and drove Sophie to her violin lesson and smiled at Renee’s book club acquaintances if I passed them in the driveway.
But the information had legs.
Real estate transactions in Arizona are public record. Renee knew this. It was her industry. I would later learn that she had set up an alert on a property data service for my name. And when that produced nothing, had apparently been searching variations. She found it through the trust name after a neighbor, a woman named Carol, who knew both Renee and my real estate agent Judy from a networking group, mentioned she’d heard Judy was closing a cash deal on Whitmore Lane.
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